Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

1 Frontline Pakistan
The capture of Ghailani and Naeem caused a huge dent in al-
Qaeda’s network, but the group had shown its great capacity to
organize into new cells. It was difficult to completely dismantle the
loosely connected and highly mobile groups and it took almost ten
months for Pakistani security forces to capture another key al-Qaeda
operative. Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan national, had been working as
the head of al-Qaeda’s external operations after the capture of KSM,
and was the key link with the Pakistani militants. Al-Libbi’s name came
to the surface after he was identified as the mastermind behind the
failed assassination attempts on Musharraf in December 2003. He had
been on the list of the six ‘most wanted’ men in a Pakistani poster
campaign for his involvement in a series of terrorist actions. 55
Al-Libbi was captured in a dramatic raid, while he was being
driven on a motorbike in Mardan, a town in the North West Frontier
Province. Intelligence agents tracked down this most wanted fugitive
after arresting a messenger. After the series of arrests of high-profile
operatives a year earlier, al-Qaeda had to minimize the use of
electronic communications and largely relied on manual messaging.
However, that also made them more vulnerable. Al-Libbi and Rabia
had taken over al-Qaeda’s operations after Ghailani’s capture. Al-
Libbi’s arrest led to some startling revelations about his contacts across
eight countries. The al-Qaeda hierarchy had always been fluid and
complex, so speculation about al-Libbi being the third in command
in the organization is hard to confirm, but he was certainly a very
important man in the global terrorist network. He was a major facilitator
and chief planner for al-Qaeda. 56 It is, however, not clear whether al-
Libbi and Rabia were in direct contact with bin Laden or al-Zawahiri,
who were still believed to be operating from the mountainous border
between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Rabia was killed in December 2005 by a missile fired by a US
predator aircraft on his hideout in a village in North Waziristan. 57 He
had figured on the CIA’s wanted list with a bounty of $5 million for his
capture. Rabia had inherited the job of chief of al-Qaeda’s operations in
Pakistan, after al-Libbi’s arrest. Reputed to be one of the organization’s
top five officials, he oversaw relations with international al-Qaeda
cells and other foreign terrorist groups. In al-Qaeda’s structure, the
operational commander was the most active of all senior leaders. 58 In
his late thirties, Rabia was reportedly sent to Iraq after the American
invasion in 2003, but was deemed too valuable to al-Qaeda central
command in Afghanistan.